AlmaLinux came into being after Red Hat decided to migrate CentOS to a pseudo-rolling release candidate. Unfortunately, several third-party tools (such as cPanel) decided to not support CentOS Stream, which left many admins and companies in the dark as to what they'd do.

That's when CloudLinux came to the rescue. CloudLinux was formed in 2009 to deliver a fork of RHEL/CentOS designed specifically for multitenancy hosting companies. But in 2020, the company realized they could pick up the pieces left behind by Red Hat.

Thus, AlmaLinux was born. This 1:1 RHEL binary compatible distribution is not only perfectly capable of being deployed in place of CentOS, you can even migrate your CentOS instances with a few quick commands. And, as of March 30, 2021, the official first release of AlmaLinux is available to download.

Of course, as if a drop-in replacement for CentOS wasn't enough, CloudLInux also formed a non-profit organization (AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation) dedicated to taking over the management of the distribution. And CloudLinux has committed a $1 million annual endowment for the AlmaLinux project. So not only do users not have to worry that CloudLinux will take the same path Red Hat did with CentOS, AlmaLinux will have plenty of funding to continue operations for some time.

Download an ISO of this exciting new server distribution now.